Let’s Not Put Up with Bad Asset Management Technologies
Jackie Luo
Investor, Interim Executive, and Advisor | Focus on disruptive technologies and digital transformation
I am often amazed at how large enterprises can put up with bad technologies. The most recent headline was Avon’s failed SAP Implementation. After putting up with it for a long time, the company was forced to write down somewhere between $100M and $125M on its balance sheet to stop this implementation.
In commenting on the debacle, industry analyst Michael Krigsman said, “Basically, users will accept less crap today, when it comes to software. That is because the world of consumer software has become easy and simple to use and has trained users to expect that business software will follow a similar model. And if it doesn’t, people are much less patient than they were in the past."
Well said. He is right, users shouldn’t put up with crap. Business users should expect more from their software vendors.
The irony is that, individually, we have high expectations for the software we use as consumers. But collectively, we often can put up with bad enterprise software technologies for a long time.
For example, individually, we want the best and latest IT gadgets for work. Collectively, we often fail to support the decision to purchase the latest asset management technology to keep track of these gadgets. We allow ourselves to use bad technologies to track the best IT gadgets.
In the world of Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), it pains me every day to see how organizations are putting up with bad technologies. Two examples of bad asset management technologies:
- Excel sheet. This is ubiquitous. 9 out of 10 companies use excel sheets to track thousands of assets, worth millions of dollars. Everybody knows excel sheets are not designed to track the constantly updated information of asset location, conditions, and chain of custody. Everybody hates it. Nobody trusts the information in these excel sheets. However, companies still use it.
- Client server type of asset management software. This type of software can only support limited number of users in fixed locations. It doesn’t support mobility. Users can’t access it from mobile devices. It’s painful to update the asset information or audit assets in the field. However, companies still use it.
Organizations should challenge themselves and their teams to use the right technology available in the market to support their asset management activities. Organizations shouldn’t let “lack of budget” be the excuse for not evaluating the available choices, particularly software solutions. There are low cost asset management technologies that are easy to use and easy to integrate with other applications. The return on investment can be easily justified. “Lack of budget” is just an excuse.
Let’s not put up with bad software technologies.
Investor, Interim Executive, and Advisor | Focus on disruptive technologies and digital transformation
10 年Thank you all for sharing the insights from your experiences... I share some of the key points raised here. 1) EAM system should be integrated with ERP (or corporate Business Sutie): 2) EAM is not CMMS; 3) Business users should drive the implementation of EAM.
Soon you will have forgotten all things; all things will have forgotten you | Curious @ Asset Management
10 年First, these organizations have invested in developing the AM framework that addresses the gaps in their AM maturity and put in place the business processes, practices and organizational elements that frame the technology requirements for a successful AM program. Then, they have developed the functional specifications from a business perspective of what the technology needs to do for them to enable them to make those investment decision (operations, maintenance and capital). This then dictates which software technology to adopt and how to configure it to suit the requirements of the organization's business needs.
Soon you will have forgotten all things; all things will have forgotten you | Curious @ Asset Management
10 年Asset Management (AM) means different things to different people based on which sector you belong to. For the IT sector, Asset Management is about accounting for the lifecycle of IT hardware and software - primarily a tracking,reviewing, and managing SLAs, hardware upgrades, etc type function. In the physical infrastructure industry (utilities,etc.), AM is a comprehensive term that includes asset tracking, maintenance work done on it (Computerized Maintenance Management System a.k.a. CMMS) and the 'management' of its life cycle. Often, when utilities say they are 'doing' AM, they are merely 'managing' work (maintenance) done on the asset through a CMMS software package. My experience has been that 90% (personal estimate) of the utilities in North America have home grown and archaic CMMS tools ( Excel included) that they use to track and manage maintenance work on their assets. The remaining 5-8% have a COTS CMMS package ( Oracle WAM, IBM Maximo, Infor EAM, etc.) that has been configured from an IT perspective and hence is of little use to the business user. However, there are a few utilities ( the remaining 2-5%) that have taken a different approach to adopting an AM Technology.
Senior Manager, Project Management at Brown and Caldwell
10 年I work primarily in the Water and Wastewater Industry and for most of our clinets, there starting point for Asset Management (AM) is their existing CMMS. For clients interested in using tools like life cycle costing, condition based monitoring, optimized decision making and other tools in our Asset Management tool kit, there is a limit to which typical CMMS packages can provide these added capabilities. Therefore, until existing CMMS packages can provide these capabilities, there will be a need to get additional software packages that are interfaced with existing CMMS systems. The challenge is to find the appropriate siftware packages to perform these trasks and in the meantime a lot of our clients will start off with using Excel based tools to achieve these additional goals for supporting their AM programs.
Reliability Improvement Consulting LLC
10 年My company is in the process of collapsing our EAM system into the corporate Business Suite - for exactly the reason mentioned by Worthey Brisco. With a "single vendor" approach we hope to fix the integration problem. Remains to be seen how that will work for us, stay tuned.